TROY -- When John Stage, CEO of Dinosaur Bar-B-Que, needs a new restaurant opened, it is to tattooed biker and Culinary Institute of America graduate Jeffrey "Cooter" Coon whom he turns.

Since Coon opened Dinosaur's second location in Rochester in 1998, he has been an integral part of the team tasked with Dinosaur's gradual expansion into new markets. Yet when Coon helped prepare the Dinosaur's fourth location, along the riverfront in downtown Troy, for a grand opening in November 2010, it was a return to the region for the company.

It was at the Harley Rendezvous Classic, a motorcycle gathering in Pattersonville that founder Stage first used a 55-gallon drum cut in half as a barbeque pit, and so began Dinosaur Bar-B-Que. After five years on the road, Stage and his partners settled in downtown Syracuse in 1988 to incorporate the now multi-million dollar company.

After helping lift the Troy operation off the ground, Coon still comes up to the city every few months -- as he was on Tuesday -- to ensure that the restaurant continues to operate smoothly. Although he is based in the Harlem restaurant, he has spent much the past few months preparing a new location in Brooklyn.

Advertisement

"The worse thing about (opening a new location) is really trying to teach people how to barbeque," explained Coon, while sitting at a high-top in the Troy location Tuesday afternoon. Barbequing requires a great deal of patience and consistency, traits it takes Coon between three and six months to instill in new chefs and managers. And while he is busy training new staff, he is still taste-testing new products.

"I'm still in the kitchen everyday, whether it's in the pits or developing stuff for the next restaurant," said Coon.

As part of an effort by Dinosaur's administration team -- which to this day has several bikers amongst its members -- to bring something new to each restaurant it opens, Coon creates three or four dishes that compliment or reflect each locality's culinary history. In the months leading up to the Troy opening, Coon designed a homemade sausage for the Troy location.

"There's so much Italian sausage up here that we modeled it after the Texas style, which is a whole lot beefier and whole different flavor profile," explained Coon. "I worked on that for at least four months. I ate a whole lot of raw pork."

That effort created the "hot links" sausages, which the restaurant serves as a small plate with homemade pimento cheese, black pepper cheddar crackers and pickled onions. They are also part of the "Ode to Lockhart," a custom plate which comes with a beef brisket and a quarter rack of ribs. The sausages were so popular that Dinosaur is now cutting, grinding and stuffing them for the every restaurant.

The meat used in those sausages comes from two Midwestern companies; the pork from Seaboard Farms, out of St. Louis, Miss., while the beef is from Creekstone, based in Arkansas City, Kan.

While some of its seasonal produce is local, Coon explained that the meats have to come from a single, large supplier that can guarantee the consistency of the cuts -- which, he emphasized, are never frozen -- and thus maintain the consistency of dishes from restaurant to restaurant.

Coming off opening Dinosaur's first out of state location -- a location in Camden, New Jersey that opened last May -- Coon is now designing the signature fare for a location in the Gowanus section of Brooklyn, set to open in mid-May. Currently under development, those dishes might eventually include a pulled-lamb dish and a brisket hash.

"Brooklyn is the kind of environment that is going to lend you some bigger flavors, a little more outgoing, maybe a little fattier, a little more aggressive in seasonings," Coon said.

Despite high chef turnover in the industry, Coon has stayed with Dinosaur for the past 15 years, and is invested, literally, in the company. As of 2010, Coons reportedly owned a .23 percent share of the company. This longevity, and apparent loyalty, is a result of Dinosaur's atmosphere, explained the master chef.

"I use to do classical French and country clubs, and the classical French cuisine kind of fell to the wayside in the mid-90s ... and the country clubs, I just wasn't hanging with," explained Coon.